Kabul, Aug 13: At least 100 security forces have been killed in the ongoing fight to push the Taliban from the embattled Afghan city of Ghazni, a government minister said on Monday, four days after the fighting began.
"About 100 security forces have lost their lives and between 20 and 30 civilians have been killed," said defence minister Tariq Shah Bahrami during a press conference in Kabul.
Rome, Mar 21: Italy on Friday reported a record 627 new deaths from the novel coronavirus, taking its overall toll past 4,000 as the pandemic gathered pace despite government efforts to halt its spread.
The total number of deaths was 4,032, with the number of infections reaching 47,021.
Italy's previous one-day record death toll was 475 on Wednesday.
The nation of 60 million now accounts for 36.6 percent of the world's coronavirus deaths.
Italy has seen more than 1,500 deaths from COVID-19 in the past three days alone.
Its current daily death rate is higher than that officially reported by China at the peak of its outbreak around Wuhan's Hubei province.
Washington, Jul 9: The United States recorded 55,000 new coronavirus cases in 24 hours on Wednesday (Thursday in Malaysia), a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed, bringing its total to 3,046,351 recorded infections since the pandemic began.
The country, the hardest-hit in the world, had earlier on Wednesday passed the grim milestone of three million infections. The actual number is likely far higher due to issues over getting tested in March and April.
The US also added an additional 833 virus deaths, bringing the death toll to 132,195, the Baltimore-based institution showed at 8.30pm (0030 GMT Thursday).
US President Donald Trump regularly downplays the numbers, attributing them to an increase in testing capacity during the month of June.
Coronavirus cases are surging in several southern hotspots including Texas, Florida, Louisiana and Arizona, but the pandemic has almost entirely receded from its former epicentre in New York and the north-east.
Several states have been forced to suspend their reopening processes or even reverse course, with some ordering bars to close again.
On Wednesday morning, Trump called on schools throughout the country to reopen in the fall, lashing out at his own top health agency to ease health and safety requirements aimed at slowing the spread of the virus, such as social distancing.
Jun 9: The World Health Organization says it still believes the spread of the coronavirus from people without symptoms is “rare,” despite warnings from numerous experts worldwide that such transmission is more frequent and likely explains why the pandemic has been so hard to contain.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO''s technical lead on COVID-19 said at a press briefing on Monday that many countries are reporting cases of spread from people who are asymptomatic, or those with no clinical symptoms.
But when questioned in more detail about these cases, Van Kerkhove said many of them turn out to have mild disease, or unusual symptoms.
Although health officials in countries including Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere have warned that COVID-19 is spreading from people without symptoms, WHO has maintained that this type of spread is not a driver of the pandemic and is probably accounts for about 6 per cent of spread, at most.
Numerous studies have suggested that the virus is spreading from people without symptoms, but many of those are either anecdotal reports or based on modeling.
Van Kerkhove said that based on data from countries, when people with no symptoms of COVID-19 are tracked over a long period to see if they spread the disease, there are very few cases of spread.
“We are constantly looking at this data and we''re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question,” she said. “It still appears to be rare that asymptomatic individuals actually transmit onward.”
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